Emmanuel (God with us): Why the real presence of Jesus Christ is so important for proper worship.

by Doug Lawrence

From all eternity, up until the physical conception and subsequent birth of Jesus Christ … in the flesh … man perceived God as a mysterious, awesomely powerful, largely unknowable being, whose divine essence was thought to consist of pure spirit.

Christmas fundamentally changed man’s perception of God as well as the reality of his divine person-hood,  since we know now that God, as part of his true nature … assumed a distinctive, eternal, human soul, along with a (now) resurrected and glorified human body. A body that is presumably … fully compatible with both heaven and earth.

So, after Jesus’ relatively short, earthly human existence was complete, it would have been quite appropriate, as well as completely truthful, to exclaim, “My God, how you’ve changed!”

The terms of God’s New Covenant substantially incorporate and memorialize that profound change in many ways, none more important than the definitive liturgical sacrifice of the New Covenant … the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass … where the memorial symbolism of the traditional Hebrew Passover Feast is replaced by the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ … the true Lamb of God … who takes away the sins of the world.

Jesus did that … just as he subsequently suffered and died for us … in the flesh … and as one of us, in every way … except for sin.

Hence, from that moment forward, anyone who desires to fully worship Jesus Christ … in spirit and truth … i.e. “body and spirit” … can no longer be fully satisfied with his spiritual presence alone, despite the way some choose to interpret the following passage:

Again I say to you, that if two of you shall consent upon earth, concerning anything whatsoever they shall ask, it shall be done to them by my Father who is in heaven. For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Matthew 18:19-20)

It’s very nice to know that God is listening to our prayers, and that he is there for us, whenever we gather in his name, but the difference (to we human faithful) between God being present in a purely spiritual sense and being  truly physically present for us … body, blood, soul and divinity … as in the Holy Eucharist … is a difference of such magnitude that it is impossible to put into words.

If it wasn’t for the incarnation, where God took on flesh and became one of us, in order to save us from our sins and reconcile heaven and earth, we would all still be hopelessly enslaved to Satan, sin and death.

Catholics incorporate all of this and more into the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the essential liturgy given to us by Christ himself, at the Last Supper, where we give correct praise and proper worship to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit … with, in and through Jesus, who is the perfect mediator and who remains the only acceptable sacrifice for sin … becoming truly present for us on the altar, at every Mass.

Presented with a sacrifice such as this, we can be assured that God will always find it pleasing and acceptable, and that he will graciously respond, even in the face of our many iniquities and human failings, since at least one of us humans present there (Jesus) has already attained divine perfection.

Without Jesus Christ, truly present, body, blood, soul and divinity … God with us … at the very center of our divine worship … we miserable sinners have very little to offer up to God. But at Mass … with Christ, in Christ, and through Christ … in the unity of the Holy Spirit … we have the ability to invariably please God, become the recipients of all his graces … and successfully maintain in our hearts the blessed hope of spending an eternity with him, in heaven.

Attempting to worship God any other way begs the question: Why would God have gone to all the trouble of becoming man, instituting the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, becoming a living sacrifice for the sins of the world, rising again from the dead and personally founding his one holy, Catholic and apostolic Church, if not to have things done the way he set them up?

Why indeed!

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Imitating Christ: How to Make Your Family Holy.

The Holy Family of Jesus is the greatest example and model for all human families. The Holy Family, like our own, knew and experienced hardships and tensions.

We hear of one such episode in the Gospel which is the basis for both the third of the Seven Sorrows of Mary and the fifth of the Joyful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary; the loss and finding of the child Jesus at the Temple.

As we meditate on this passage of Sacred Scripture (cf. Luke 2:41ff), we can relate to the emotions that Mary and Joseph experienced, the anxiety and joy, in realizing that they did not know where their child was and then finding him safe and well at the Temple.

Going deeper, we can each, perhaps, see in our own life the times when we have left Jesus behind… the anxiety when apart and the joy and peace that comes when we have again found Jesus in the center of our family.

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Abortion is the leading cause of death among black Americans.

In January, Margaret Sanger’s disciples and abortion lovers have much to celebrate.  It will be the 40th year of legally sanctioned abortions in the United States.  At the time I am writing this, the death toll of murdered babies via abortion methods is 55,110,996, and it climbs every few seconds.

These murdered babies are predominately black babies.  Where are the crusaders for social and racial justice, for the worst racist genocide in human history?

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The Introduction to History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium

The Catholic Church is the longest-enduring institution in the world, and her historical character is integral to her identity. The earliest Christians claimed to be witnesses to the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, thereby making Christianity a historical religion, emanating from a Judaism that was itself a historical religion.
Christianity staked its claim to truth on certain events, notably that at a precise moment in history the Son of God came to earth.

The Gospels have a ring of historical authenticity partly because of the numerous concrete details they contain, the care with which they record the times and places of Jesus’ life.

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Sometimes we have to wade in, sword or gun in hand, and use deadly force to quash the actions of evil men—and we must do so without hating them.

Too soon after Christmas trees are taken down, hundreds of thousands of us will be getting ready to freeze in our nation’s capital while we March for Life. The presence of evil, of very different kinds, is harder to miss this year than most—at least since 2001, when my hometown was attacked. Because it was innocent blood, willingly offered, that wiped away the evil each of carries in himself, and offered us the antidote: imitating Christ, making sacrifices freely to further the Good, and push back against evil.

Those sacrifices aren’t always peaceful—which is why the Church has thousands of soldier saints. We are not a religion for pacifists, or those who would stand by dabbing our tears and caressing our consciences while the weak are victimized. Sometimes we have to wade in, sword or gun in hand, and use deadly force to quash the actions of evil men—and we must do so without hating them. That doesn’t mean without anger, or even without (where needed) the will to kill. The plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 was carried out by a Catholic war hero, Claus von Stauffenberg, and met with the approval of Pius XII—who transmitted messages on behalf of the conspirators.

Nor is it hate to want to see a criminal be punished, or to take a grim satisfaction in the execution of his sentence. Only those who do not believe in life after death who could think this way; to them, earthly life is the only and ultimate good, so wanting to spoil that for or take that from someone (for any reason) amounts to hate.

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‘Moving beyond the Church or even beyond Jesus.”

What’s at stake is the drift among some U.S. nuns away from the Church’s faith in the central role of Christ and His Body, the Church, in human salvation. The CDF implies that some in the leadership of the LCWR have embraced forms of inter-religious dialogue based upon the alleged or supposed equality of all religions.

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And now … for the “Don’t Let the Door Hit You On the Way Out Department” …

AMSTERDAM—Thousands of Dutch Catholics are researching how they can leave the church in protest at its opposition to gay marriage, according to the creator of a website aimed at helping them find the information.

Link

Time for a national discussion on match control?

Witness Erickson Ipina called 911, and police arrested Dennis Petillo, 24, a short time later. He was booked for investigation of attempted murder and was held on $500,000 bail. It wasn’t immediately known if he had retained an attorney.

“He just poured it all over the old lady,” Ipina told reporters at the scene. “Then he threw the match on her and started running.”

Link

Editor’s note: It’s time we banned any match book or box containing more than 5 matches … and completely outlawed “assault” lighters. The Bill of Rights is totally silent about any supposed “right” to bear fire.  Oh, where is Senator Feinstein when we need her most?!

Big problems with fatherless families

America is awash in poverty, crime, drugs and other problems, but more than perhaps anything else, it all comes down to this, said Vincent DiCaro, vice president of the National Fatherhood Initiative: Deal with absent fathers, and the rest follows.

People “look at a child in need, in poverty or failing in school, and ask, ‘What can we do to help?’ But what we do is ask, ‘Why does that child need help in the first place?’ And the answer is often it’s because [the child lacks] a responsible and involved father,” he said.

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A massive, little known abortion scandal that led to the largest known cemetery burial in history.

After three and a half years of legal wrangling, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in August, 1985 ordered the 16,433 mangled babies’ bodies found in Woodland Hills in 1982 to be turned over to the Guerra-Gutirrez-Alexander Mortuary for burial. Per the court’s order, the mortuary was selected because they didn’t have a religious affiliation.

To comply with the court order that the identity of the mothers, babies and abortionists be concealed, the Los Angeles County health department ordered the bodies to be dumped in bulk out of the individual containers into six coffin-sized plywood boxes lined with plastic. The department assured the ACLU that there would be no containers with identifying marks. While the ACLU would not object, the Feminist Women’s Health Center petitioned the Los Angeles Superior Court to block the burial, but the courts refused.

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Time for a national discussion on subway control?

Thursday’s death marks the second incident this month of a man being killed after being pushed onto subway tracks and killed by an oncoming train.

Detectives in New York are searching for a female suspect who fled a subway station after a man was fatally pushed in front of a train on an elevated platform in Queens, N.Y.

Link

Editor’s note: Can we assume that Gov. Cuomo is once again weighing all his options?

Greatest Sin of our Time?

Before explaining what the Greatest Sin of our time is, let me prove that it also comes from the serpent, Lucifer. In 1930 two people wrote plans to destroy America from within and turn it into a communist nation. Lest you have no problem with communism it killed 1,500,000.000 of its own people in 60 years and every nation that adopted it failed financially, where everyone became poor. These two people were Antonio Gramsy and Saul Alinski. Salinski, a friend and teacher of Obama, wrote RULES FOR RADICALS, TOWARDS A SOVIET AMERICA.

In this book he outlined how to take over schools, the news media, the government, and even the history books. He planed to little by little to infiltrate the Churches and degrade the constitution of the USA. His teachers were George Bernard Shaw, Bernard Russal and John Dewy.

Most important is that he dedicated his book to Lucifer, the first radical.

Morality was Alinski greatest enemy and to overcome this he had to get moral teaching out of the school, Churches and even government laws. His idea was to replace moral laws with Lucifer laws of tolerance, non-judgmentalism, and acceptance of all point of views. He even wanted laws against speaking out against any kind of sin. These people infiltrated the schools and churches and led the progressive movement in politics. Progressives believe that the constitution is old fashioned and needs to be re-interpreted to fit the modern world. This plan was so successful that it produced the greatest sin of our age, That our conscience is the God of good or evil.

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Video link

Submitted by Bob Stanley

The Importance Of Sunday In The Lives Of Christians

The pastoral statement on the importance of Sunday calls for Orthodox and Catholic Christians to recover the theological significance of a day that for many “has become less a day of worship and family and more like an ordinary work day.” It ends with a call to clergy and laity “to work cooperatively within their communities to stress the importance of Sunday for worship and family.”

The full text of the statement is available online here.

Father Z and Michael Voris are sponsoring a Lenten cruise/retreat. Some take issue with it.

Be sure to peruse the reader comments!

Christmas is the day God permanently and eternally perfected mankind, in and through his son, Jesus Christ.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

520     In all of his life Jesus presents himself as our model. He is “the perfect man”, who invites us to become his disciples and follow him. In humbling himself, he has given us an example to imitate, through his prayer he draws us to pray, and by his poverty he calls us to accept freely the privation and persecutions that may come our way.

521     Christ enables us to live in him all that he himself lived, and he lives it in us. “By his Incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man.” We are called only to become one with him, for he enables us as the members of his Body to share in what he lived for us in his flesh as our model:

We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often to beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church… For it is the plan of the Son of God to make us and the whole Church partake in his mysteries and to extend them to and continue them in us and in his whole Church. This is his plan for fulfilling his mysteries in us.

The sign of swaddling clothes: A live baby wrapped up – as if for burial …

The mystery of the newborn Christ as wrapped in swaddling clothes, that is, a live baby as wrapped up as if for burial, pre-foretells the resurrection when Christ would set aside His swaddling clothes, His burial shroud, when He awoke from the sleep of death in His glorified body.

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Seen on the web:

The Middle Eastern culture developed a way to deal with in-journey deaths. Each person would take a long, thin, gauze-like cloth and wrap it around their waist many times. This would be one of the bottom layers of clothing. This cloth would be reserved for death. If someone died during the journey, their friends or family would remove the “swaddling cloth” and wrap them from head to toe so they could compete the journey.

The baby Jesus was wrapped in Joseph’s death cloth. The sign for the shepherds wasn’t that they’d find a baby wrapped in a blanket in a manger. The sign was that they’d find a baby prepared for death. Jesus came to earth to die for our sins. That was his purpose. This was shown even from the instance of his birth.

What a God.

Lana said…

So the baby Jesus was wrapped in the death clothes of a man named Joseph, and thirty three years later was buried in the tomb of a man named Joseph?

You’re right. What a God.

How God can bring about good, even in the wake of unspeakable evil.

Once upon a time, I went to church every Sunday. I went to Catholic school — St. Stephen in Hamden. But as high school wore on, I attended Mass less and less. Eventually, my participation was reduced to the holidays — Christmas morning and Easter Sunday, maybe the odd Mass in between. In the past few years, I’ve abandoned even the holidays, leaving me agnostic at best.

But on Saturday, I was assigned to cover a Mass at St. Rose of Lima Church, a Catholic church in Newtown.

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Illinois scandal of the week: 260 clergy — many from Chicago — back gay-marriage legislation.

Link

Supreme irony: Catholics honor the Blessed Virgin Mary for being the perfect example of the greatest Protestant virtue.

One of the battle-cries of the Protestant Reformation was “Faith Alone!”  One key conviction that united the many disparate strands of the Reformation was that it is impossible to earn God’s favor by our good works . . . that we rather we receive his love as a pure gift, a grace, through faith.

Now consider Mary.  Did she crisscross the Mediterranean planting Churches like Paul?  Did she give eloquent sermons like Stephen (Acts 7)?  Did she govern the Church like Peter?  No.  Her claim to fame is that she simply said yes to God.  She believed He could do as he said and would do as He said.

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A special essay on Modernism and why its presence is so strong in our days.

In his book “Athanasius”, Bishop Rudolf Graber, of Regensburg, explains how the Evil One in the course of the ages has attacked the Holy Catholic Church in ways increasingly refined, insidious, and intimate. He began by attacking the faithful through persecutions, but seeing that these lead rather to an increase of the Faith, he adopted another method: that of attacking the Faith itself.

With the heresies of Martin Luther he managed to detach a great number of people from the Catholic Church; with the heresies that comprise Modernism, he has even succeeded at present in contaminating the Faith of a great number of people within the Church Herself.

What is Modernism? Saint Pius X defines it in his encyclical Pascendi as “the synthesis of all heresies”. The Code of Canon Law (CIC. 751) defines heresy as: “the obstinate denial, after receiving baptism, of a truth which is to be believed by Divine and Catholic Faith, or the obstinate doubt concerning it…”

Now, what is defined by the words ‘a truth which is to be believed by Divine and Catholic Faith’ is Catholic dogma. We observe that Modernism has in fact a wider scope than Catholic dogma as here defined, in that it extends to all traditional Catholic doctrines, even if they have not yet been defined as dogmas. In other words, Modernism includes the denial not only of all dogmas, but also of all traditional Catholic doctrine.

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